This is a Chevrolet Malibu. There is no hiding that fact; there is not even an attempt to hide that fact. Fortune magazine called it in 1983 and we’re seeing the disastrous results in this transparent money-saving exercise. The Cutlass name is but a zombie on this uninspired lump of medium-sized car product and dammit, it deserved better.
Reading all of the Curbside Classic Complete Cutlass Chronicles, one can see what I am on about. The Cutlass survived as long as it did thanks to its ability to adapt to ever-changing tastes. Even I, who wasn’t even alive until the GM-10 models were already in production, can appreciate how the powers that be skillfully steered the model name from a mere trim level to sporty model, to a plush-mobile, to losing its track and being called a Saturn lookalike or A-Body Product number 18-5-15. Or what should’ve been the end. It would’ve been a fitting end for the Cutlass and CCCCC. An ending with variety and some integrity for the Cutlass and an unlucky number 13 ending for the series, reflecting the final misfortunes of the vehicle itself. Alas, it was not to be.
Say whatever you want about the W-Body Cutlasses (Cutlasi?). Yes, timing made them look like large Saturns instead of making Saturns look like mini Oldsmobiles. Yes the interior was somewhat sketchy when compared to something like a Mercury Sable and they may have not been the most dynamic cars on the roads. But they had something that this Malibu in a hat didn’t: a unique identity.
Compare a W-Body Supreme with a Pontiac Grand Prix or a Buick Regal and you can still see some differences between them; they all have unique designs and styling cues that reflect the (alleged) brand values as demanded by their consumers. They at least made the slightest of efforts to try and be different from one another, something to at least say “No, this is not a Chevrolet Monte Carlo, this is an Oldsmobile.” The Cutlass Ciera, less so. Differentiation was never the strong suit of the A-Body but it still managed so sell in very decent numbers and have some variety in the form of a 5-door wagon and the very oddly proportioned and now impossible to find two-door coupe.
Not so with this Cutlass. Even someone who has just had laser eye surgery can tell this is just a Malibu at fifty paces. Not helping matters is the fact that this particular Malibu is one of the most uninspired designs to ever come out of GM. There wasn’t anything specifically bad about it, in fact there wasn’t anything to say about it full stop. At least the K-Body Sevilles had body-shivering awfulness to carry them into the public conscience. This commits the even worse (Deadly?) sin of mediocrity. Doing nothing, achieving nothing, not even trying to do or achieve anything. If it had a hobby it would be water-tasting. Or explaining to people why some sidewalks seem to be filled with little sparkly bits. There was no convertible, no sporty version. No versions for that matter. Just a single note of beige.
It’s the same story inside, where I can say without even the tiniest fear of being wrong that the only thing that’s different between it and an ordinary Malibu is the logo on the steering wheel and perhaps a bit more plastic covering on the gear lever. There were absolutely no mechanical differences between it and the normal Malibu barring the fact that you couldn’t get a four-cylinder engine in the Cutlass. That meant you only had the head-cracking 3.1L V6 as an option, mated to a reliable, if uninspired, four speed Automatic.
This provided a nice contrast to contemporary Honda Accords where you had amazing engines and automatics made out of glass, porcelain and egg shells. This name-defiling only lasted for two years, as the N-Body Cutlass was intended to just be a stopgap model. Something that makes it all the sadder the more you think about it.
It was replaced by the Alero, a car that was considerably more in the mold of what a Cutlass should’ve been. Still based on the N-Body, the Alero had unique styling and a different interior. It was also available as a two-door coupe and with a manual transmission. Alongside the Aurora, it painted a bright future for Olds, one where they weren’t confused about their identity and they didn’t just have hand-me-down cars to show for themselves. But rather, a full lineup of stylish, quick and elegant cars.
So why not call it a Cutlass? Perhaps they wanted to cut themselves away from the mistakes of the past and forge a new path for themselves. Away from underdeveloped diesels and under-inspired Firenzas. And it’s not like the Cutlass name had anything resembling the cachet it had in the early and mid-eighties. Certainly not after this Malibu Mess. The Alero and Aurora were great but they were too late and soldiered on until 2004 when Oldsmobile shut down for good. In fact, the last Oldsmobile was an Alero sedan which now resides in the Ransom E. Olds Museum. Call me an old romantic, but it should’ve been a Cutlass. It would’ve been a fitting end for both the Make and the model.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! seeing it again is like a bad dream. The suspension on mine was shot at 40k miles. So badly shot that the wind from a passing truck would cause the car to swerve over a lane by itself. What fun!
I grew up a Cultass fan, drove a ’73 and ’76 personally, and they were everywhere. The Cutlass brand started to lose me when the Cutlass Ciera came along. I just didn’t like seeing the name on two unrelated cars.
Of course, everything got much worse, falling to this Cutlabu. A sad end to what had been a dynasty.
Despite all of the bad times, I still wonder if putting the Cutlass name on the Alero would have been better. Olds seemed to die another death when dropping all of its traditional names. The death of the 88 really seemed to be the final lethal injection, they killed their then most popular car and nameplate with no clear replacement.
Why not call the Alero a Cutlass? (Or why not call the Intrigue a Cutlass, as that car really filled the market slot occupied by the Cutlass Supreme.)
I recall reading that when Oldsmobile showed what became the Intrigue to potential customers in clinics, there was a significant drop in interest when they were told it was the next Cutlass. Like it or not, by the early 1990s the name itself had become poison.
This particular car was always meant to be stop-gap effort. Didn’t it really replace the old Cutlass Ciera, which was the division’s best-selling vehicle by that point?
When GM showed the upcoming Intrigue to customer clinics, the target yuppies refused to look at anything called ‘Cutass’.
The name was sullied with all the slow elderly drivers in Cieras going 45 on Interstates.
Excellent article Gerardo! I couldn’t agree with you more about this car. A mediocre ending to a once-proud nameplate.
As for Olds, the Aurora-Intrigue-Alero lineup was too little, too late. GM just had too many brands, and they were competing with each other as much or even more than they were with outside brands. It is a pity though, as Olds was moving in the right direction. Even though I was very young around 2000, I still noticed this transition, and liked these younger-appealing Oldsmobiles (Cutlibu Cutlass excluded, of course).
I could kinda see where they were going with this Cutlass, they wanted a bland, conservative replacement for the “forever” A-body FWD Cutlass Ciera that was going out of production in 1996 and at the same time they wanted a more up to date compact to replace the N-body UNDA-Acheiva, but this found few takers.
Buick was smarter and it offered a “foogie” version of the revamped W-body Regal, the bench seat Century which satisfied the older clientele. Now I know that Olds was trying as hard as is could to shake the old folks image, but when they are the only ones buying your cars in big numbers, it doesn’t hurt to keep them in your back pocket as you “re-vamp” the division.
I wonder if Olds would have fared better with a bench seat version of the Intrigue badged as the Cutlass Supreme and perhaps conservative 2nd gen Aurora based Delta 88. Even Pontiac still offered a bench seat Grand Prix SE and bench seat version of the 2000 and up Bonneville.
I always thought the traditional Olds buyer wanted a bench seat and column shifter.When they dropped them in a bid to appeal to a younger buyer they made a car old people didn’t want and young people wouldn’t be seen dead in.You can sell a young mans car to an old man but you can’t sell an old man’s car to anyone.
I obviously can’t speak for him, but I don’t think a bench seat and column shifter would’ve been a deal breaker for my grandfather, the Oldsmobile man. That said, he always looked out of place driving anything but a Oldsmobile or Buick. I remember once when his Olds was in the shop, he rented the cheapest car possible – a red Kia Sephia. 6-feet tall and broad shouldered, he looked really funny climbing down into that thing.
I always wonder what he would’ve purchased next (he passed away in 2003). I feel like the Buick Lucerne would’ve been the closest successor to his Olds Eighty-Eight.
GM should have stared consolidating dealerships earlier, there was too much luxury creep up from Chevrolet as they started offering leather and nicer interiors and too much desire by the other divisions to want to “one of everything”
Saturn should have been part of Oldsmobile, which was one of the plans for launching Saturn, instead of a stand alone dealer network. The Pontiac-GMC link up and later addition of Buick to most Pontiac-GMC dealers should have started in the early 80’s, not in the late 1990’s as it did.
Bonneville FWD with a Northstar V8, bench seat and steering column automatic shift! Ouch. Too nice! Yesterday I parked with my Fiat Punto next to a Cadillac DeVille (DTS). It was badged as a Northstar V8. In the meantime my V6 Lumina is sitting in a repair shop’s yard silently waiting the new spares from the U.S. … 🙂
My grandparents bought one new, first car they had with leather seats, served them well over the last 15 years and 30k miles. Yes, only 30k, it was literally the little old ladies car that got driven to church. They recently gave it to my parents, and its official title is now “The Grandma Car”. Can’t turn down such a clean low miles car, even if it’s frumpy and boring.
The name “olds” was the best descriptor.
Growing up in the eighties I only saw one GM brand that mattered, Chevrolet.
The rest were more expensive clones of a terrible car you could purchase for thousands less.
Nice finale, I’m waiting for the missing link between the facts that some sidewalks seem to be filled with little sparkly bits, and that Honda automatic transmissions made from glass, porcelain and egg shells.
Sounds like global supply chain management.
My embarrassing story with this car is I actually didn’t know what it was. Somehow the introduction of this and the Malibu had gone under my radar. A friend picked me up in his (beige, of course) rental car at one point and we rode around in it for a few days. It was so completely generic, inside and out, that I assumed it was some sort of cheap import – perhaps a Daewoo or something. Around the third day, I happened to approach the car from the rear corner and caught the nameplate, which produced the reaction of “wait, WHAT?” It was so indistinguishable that I really had no idea. A sad chapter indeed.
I had the same confusing reaction but about the Malibu when it had been freshly released to the market… The Malibu sibling Cutlass could have been sold ALSO with bench seat and column shift as well… The rear end of the Cutlass with its plastic red light alike molding is nicer then the Malibu’s back. Anyway Oldsmobile became history…
I owned a ’97 Malibu and rented a Cutlass at some point during the model run. They were, indeed, clones. The crazy thing was, at the time, these cars were heralded as evidence that GM had finally caught on to what the modern Accords and Camrys were up to. In some ways, they were as generic as it came — I remember the car serving its mission as the second family car without a whole lot of fanfare. It was boring as heck to drive, but it was reasonably roomy. The engine was pokey and thirsty, but otherwise unmemorable. It handled adequately — no sports car, but no land barge either. The worst part was the mega cheapie interior — a fiesta of plastics in a riot of shapes.
These were the Stepford Wives of the modern late 90’s family car — they looked the part, but had no soul. Compared to older Cutlasses — I owned a ’76 Cutlass S as my first car — they had no personality. But, really, GM had been tossing personality out the window for a couple of decades before these cars arrived. A sad end? Yes. Unexpected? No, not really.
Steve M. – The introduction of the Malibu and the car mag swooning (and COTY consideration) is precisely the moment I realized that auto media reviews and opinions could be easily bought, and I lost interest in supporting their fervor.
Never has such a blandtastic design injured our eyes, with perhaps the exception of the Chevy Corsica.
Peter DeLorenzo wrote in “The United States Of Toyota” that when this generation Malibu (and therefore Cutlass variant) was designed, they brought in the then-current Honda Accord to benchmark.
Which means by the time the Malibu was released to the public, it was obsolete as a new, improved Accord had also been released which raised the bar.
Since the Cutlass version came a year or two later it was even worse.
Sad commentary on a once-storied nameplate and yet another damning account of a General Motors I hope is gone for good as today’s GM, in contrast, rolls out the most dynamic all-around vehicles in their history.
“The Alero and Aurora were great…”
Alero? Great? I want some of what you’re smoking… Did it look good? Yes, from the outside it was an attractive car. And it wasn’t bad to drive. We somehow got 175,000 miles out of one. But it had *so* many problems, *so* many quality issues, *so* many things go wrong before it hit 10 years old, plus an extremely craptastic late 90’s GM interior, that I don’t even think it belongs in the same paragraph as “great”.
Now these “Cutlass” clones had all the same faults but were missing any of the virtues, so of course that’s a bigger sin. As an owner of an older Malibu, I was actually disappointed when these N-body Malibus came on the scene in the mid 90’s…I thought the nameplate deserved better. So, so bland. And then to apply another once-proud nameplate to it, with no changes…bad to worse. Subsequent Malibus redeemed themselves somewhat (the 2008-2012 generation was a particularly good car) but this was a really sad end for the Cutlass.
Alero was a Grand Am stripped of cladding, and dumped into rental fleets. No way were they going to get any import buyers to look at them with the desperation. Chintzy interiors and dealers stuck in 1975, with hard sell tactics, did not attract upsacle buyers. Seeing Aleros with ‘carriage’ roofs was enough to kill off the cars.
GM essentially blew through all their good will and $$, and had to get bailed out. If not for full sized truck sales, they be in car heaven with Packard.
I checked the used 1999 Cutlasses. Most of them are available at prices over $4.000-4.500,- as they are 15 years old. Not a bad output for an oddball (?) cartype… In our neighbourhood the Oldsmobile Alero had been marketed as Chevrolet Alero!!!
The ’92 Brougham has always gone easy on my eyes, and seems like a car that could look good in an old car show in 2025. It had nice proportions and used the wraparound glass to good effect.
Neat pic!
People who weren’t fans of GM often criticized the company of building 1 basic car and just changing the grille and/or tail lights to make a Chevy into….say, a Pontiac, or Oldsmobile?
This car manages to prove that GM’s existence, by the 80s and 90s was truly owed to a fragile tissue
of illusion. A few dollars in plastic was about all that separated a Malibu and Cutlass.
My little brother has owned several of these Malibus. Under his VERY minimal care they truly are “disposable” cars.
Perhaps instead of Cutlass they should have been called Cleanex? (So as not to entirely infringe on a trademark.)
Should have just called it “Olds Malibu” as when Mopar sold Neons as Dodge and Plymouth. Why bother with different names? Or just “GM P body”, “Peabody”.
I remember the first time I saw one of these, I figured it must be a Canadian car. But when I saw the dealer tag on the back that it was a local car I was shocked and saddened at the same time. Sure, the General has always changed grills, taillights, occasionally some sheet metal, wheels etc. to differentiate the different brands, but the Cutlibu was simply a joke. To me it was a total disgrace to the Cutlass name. You could see that practically not a dime was spent to differentiate the car from the Malibu. At least the Cutlass Ciera was a good selling car for its long 15 year run. Its as if GM said, lets slap the Cutlass name on the Malibu, change a few details and see if it sells. What an absolute disgrace.
There was a bizzaro Canadian 2nd cousin to this Cutlass, Pontiac Tempest, which was a lousy Corsica with a Pontiac badge and a phoned in split grille.
Was this the last Cheviac?
Unless you count the Pontiac Aveo.
The Chevrolet Aveo / Pontiac G3 Vawe was/is rebadged DAEWOO Kalos / Gentra… 🙂
Thats why I sort of excluded them, true that it was sold as a Cheviac in Canada, it was already someone elses car rebadged and then regbadged again.
Did we get the Pontiac G5 in the USA? I don’t remember seeing them around. If not, that would be the last.
The 99 Cutlass was meant to get elder Ciera owners to trade in. I.E. An older nameplate for them. It was literally cloned overnight from Malibu. It was only on sale for 2=3 years.
GM just phoned it in when Roger Smith took over, and acted as if they were “entited” to large market share. “Throw anything at the wall, it will sell since we are #1”.
The W bodies were a huge disappointment compared to the Taurus and Sable. GM was thinking, “build a copy of a Ford hit, and they will come”, like they did with 60’s Camaro. But, silly gimmicks like B pillar door lacthes don’t make a car worth buying.
I disagree. It’s even worse than phoning it in. These were benchmarked against top Japanese competition. GM was actually trying, which is sad. The structure was, by then, so dysfunctional that any actual competitive features that the engineers built in were sanded off by ever higher committees reviewing and changing things before final approval.
I’m going to be contrary and put some sparkle in this thread. I own one–exactly like the picture in brown turd paint. Prior to that, I owned an A-body sedan. I can speak volumes on these rides.
The N-body is miles ahead of the A-body in build quality and engineering. Seems to fit better, with better ride, noise suppression, creature comforts and the like. Fuel economy is as good or better than the A-body (with the Iron Duke Tech 4 and 3 speed auto). I like it better than the A-body.
The A-body died because of failed weatherstripping. No such problem in the N-body with another decade’s technology using better materials (99 N-body vs 89 A-body).
Reliablity is decent for an end of life (226k miles) machine. My suspension is OK; I can’t agree with “shot suspension at 40k miles”. No unusual breakdowns or tempermental systems except for the 60 degree 3.1l V-6 lower intake manifold gaskets. For that reason, I got this vehicle for free.
One thing nobody’s said–parts for these are mega-cheap and very available in every pull-a-part junkyard in the nation. Need parts–pick from the many you’ll find in the junkyard. Got junkyard parts to put on this weekend (rear brakes and rear bearing). Paid next to nothing ($15 for each rear hub/bearing) vs. 5-times as much new.
Don’t forget: this Cutla…er…Malibu…was the 1997 Motor Trend Car of the Year… Mind you, the Vega and Aspen also won this award at one time…but those are whole other stories…
My favorite CAR OF THE YEAR (you need the breathless headline for full effect) is the first bathtub Caprice LTZ. Likely the last time a BOF V8 powered car won that award.
Even this picture has me smelling leaking Dexcool
I have been using the specified Dexcool coolant for 14 years in my car with no ill affects either observed by me or my trusted mechanic,
+1. I’m just waiting for someone to claim that if not for “orange death”, the Vega engine would have demonstrated respectable reliability.
I like that this car was so bland that Chevy made fun of it ads for the Malibu that replaced it…
Having ridden a 2001 Malibu occasionally at work, and owning a 1995 Grand Am, I have to say that the interior of the Malibu was immeasurably better than some of it’s predecessor GM cars. That Malibu was a huge improvement; of course, when you compare it to the utter rubbish that went before, that may not be saying much.
This is how you kill the oldest car company in the US.
“If we make it as dull looking as a Camry, people will think it is as high quality as a Camry!”
Glen.h:
That would be hilarious if it weren’t true. I (thought) I read somewheres that when they were readying the Malibu for sale, they even went so far as to model the badging on the Malibu after that used by Toyota on the Camry.
And I remember the big deal made of the ignition key being placed to the right of the steering column. If that’s someone’s idea of “break-through” technology, you know it’s a pretty dull car.
Mark
congratulations with your trouble free use of Dexcool.
Wish I had had the same experience.
“It’s the same story inside, where I can say without even the tiniest fear of being wrong that the only thing that’s different between it and an ordinary Malibu is the logo on the steering wheel and perhaps a bit more plastic covering on the gear lever.”
The dashboards were indeed ever-so-slightly different, though all the hardpoints were of course the same.
Leave it to GM to waste money attempting to differentiate between two identical models, in a manner resulting in so few people ever noticing that distinction.
Malibu:
I remember driving over a rough patch in one of these and the stereo never worked again. The aftermarket stereo would work fine in any other car. I even re-wired the damn thing and still no radio. It ended up getting stolen after a friend borrowed the car and left it on the side of the road after it broke down. It was recovered in the northern part of Indy but I cared too little to pay the fee. Hopefully it met the crusher shortly after. A terrible boring car.